112 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



wall of glacier-ice, perpetually fed from the snows which fall on 

 the land within it, and varying in height from 150ft. to 200ft. 

 As you are no doubt aware, many navigators of note, includ- 

 ing Cook, Wilkes, Briscoe, D'Urville, Bellingshausen, and 

 Eoss, made attempts, prior to the year 1844, to examine these 

 regions, of whom Eoss alone penetrated the ice-pack, and after 

 the most arduous exertions succeeded in reaching a point 

 within two or three degrees from the 80th parallel, from which 

 he saw the great active volcano named by him Mount Erebus. 

 From the point thus reached he ran eastward for about two 

 hundred miles along a perpendicular ice-wall, and then re- 

 turned in a diagonal line, from the neighbourhood of the 162nd 

 meridian west of Greenwich, to a point on the 180th meridian 

 where it intersects the 70th parallel. Little has been added 

 since Eoss's voyages to our knowledge of the position or 

 extent of the south polar land, but, although the accounts of 

 the several voyages are in themselves of much interest as evi- 

 dences of the indomitable energy of the navigators engaged 

 on them, and as matters of geographical information, their 

 value, from a scientific point of view, is small when compared 

 with the many more important results which may be expected 

 from the operations of those who are about to engage in the 

 proposed expeditions. In the hope of obtaining these higher 

 results, all the scientific bodies in Europe and the United 

 States have long concurred in urging the necessity of replac- 

 ing, by active and skilled explorations, the practically total 

 neglect into which the examination of the antarctic regions 

 has fallen since the above-mentioned expeditions; for with the 

 exception of the data brought home by Eoss, and those more 

 recently obtained by the " Challenger," little, if anything, has 

 been done to increase our stock of knowledge in any depart- 

 ment of science in connection with those regions which can 

 bear satisfactory comparison with the wonderful results that 

 have followed from work done within the arctic area. There 

 is no doubt, however, that the difficulties experienced by the 

 few who have since attempted to explore the antarctic seas, 

 and the gloomy accounts which they, one and all, gave of 

 long and wearisome working through the ice-pack, and of the 

 apparently interminable and impenetrable wall of glacier-ice 

 which barred all efforts at land-exploration, were well calcu- 

 lated to excite exaggerated ideas of the obstacles to success 

 presented both by the sea and shore aspects of the area in 

 question. But recent experiences have, to a considerable ex- 

 tent, modified these gloomy views, and the fact that Captain 

 Larsen, of the Norwegian steamship " Jasen," was not only 

 able, with comparatively little difficulty, to sail along the 

 eastern coast of Graham's Land, and to ascertain its correct 

 position for upwards of two hundred miles, but was also able 



